Ways to Support the People of Ukraine

Those who are regular participants in Friday night and Saturday morning services with us might have intuited by now that the emphasis of my Divrei Torah, my teachings from torah, tend not to engage directly or explicitly with the headlines of the week.

This is not out of any philosophical objection to politics or current events being spoken of on the bimah (platform or stage in a synagogue; plural: bimot)—quite the contrary: our political choices are expressions of our values, our consciences, our spirits. Jewish texts quite overtly make political statements about social duties to care for one another and the stranger, on a collective, political level.

No my tendency to shy away from engaging more explicitly with politics on the bimah has more to do with opportunity cost: while we can talk politics or current events in many spaces in our lives—our work worlds, our friendship circles, many of us have the news on blaring in the background every night—in how many places can we reflect on God? On eternity? On the nature of the fundamental connection of all things? On the divine? Even if we have ambivalent or outright antagonistic relationships to some of these concepts, how many spaces in today’s world give us the chance to wrestle overtly with them. To wonder about the role of God in our lives, if there is one, the role of prayer, of ritual?

So my limited engagement with matters of politics on the bimah has less to do with any philosophical objection and more to do with an opportunity I want to seize to have people wrestle with some of these transcendent questions, if only on the day built for it: shabbat.

But there are times when the waves of the world breach even the highest walls we might create for them. The people of Ukraine are not experiencing an oneg shabbat this week, a sabbath of delight; they’re experiencing what one might call a pachad shabbat, a sabbath of fear, and trepidation. Of their worlds being turned upside down.

Ukraine is not ancillary to the Jewish experience. If anything it is right at the heart of it. As I understand it, Jews immigrated to Eastern Europe from germanic lands as early as tenth or eleventh centuries, accelerating in numbers over the course of the next several hundred years. This trend was only reversed in the 17th century when as many as 40,000 jews were killed in the Khmelnytsky massacres, Jews seen as agents of landowners. From this disaster in Ukraine blossomed the seeds of one of the most influential and meaningful Jewish movements of the past several hundred years, as the Baal Shem Tov founded Hasidism, a mystical Jewish renewal movement that helped inject kavanah/meaning, joy, and spirituality into Jewish practice and learning that has reverberations until today,

All four of my paternal grandparents were likely born in Ukraine, as were so many Jews who immigrated to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to escape pogroms. This ebb and flow of Jewish vibrancy and dangers to Jewish living continues to pulse like a beating heart in Ukraine to this moment.

So there are times when the events of the world flow right up to this bimah and to bimot all around the world.

So, here we are, what do we say, what do we do, in response to the events of war in ukraine halfway around the globe?

What do we do. That’s so often where our minds go at moments like. Seeing the missiles fire and the tanks roll, we feel so powerless at moments like this, especially when there is little appetite among most for a military response.

So what do we do? I think it’s helpful if we frame the responses through an external lens, what do we do outwardly, and an internal lens, what do we do inwardly, even while we recognize the two are connected—the one fueling the other symbiotically.

Externally what do we do?

Well as citizens of a democracy, recognizing that fundamentally and ultimately, it is governments and elected officials who are going to be the primary actors on the international stage, it’s not what we do in the moment, but it’s what we do every four years, and every two years, and all the moments in between to make sure we get out the vote, and get people who elected who, with the reins of power in their hands, will act according to our values—values of decency, of cooperation, of peace, of strength, of consistency, of steadfastness. Leaders whom we can trust to bring the world community together in the face of danger and autocracy.

So that’s part of what we can do: we can stay engaged—with our world, and with our democracy, and recognize the truth of the statement that I learned from my friend Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum that we often overestimate what we can achieve in one year and underestimate what we can achieve in ten.

Second, we must be willing to bear some of the burden ourselves. If we are going to signal to Putin that this is the end and not the beginning of his aggrandizement of power we must all, the world over, be willing to muster the resolve and the commitment to say that enough is enough. If the economic sanctions our leaders say are necessary to close ranks around him lead to, I don’t know I’m not an economist, but something like higher energy prices, that should be a sacrifice we’re collectively willing to make, ensuring that we protect the most economically vulnerable in our communities from that. If the U.S. needs to take in more refugees borne of this war, that’s what we’re here for. Those are actions that are in alignment with our values. Lending political will and support behind sanctions, taking in refugees. If it may not seem like there are actionable steps available to us in this very moment, well, where there’s a will there’s a way. If we remain committed, even if it takes time, the bulwark of our collective energies and resources will help stop autocracies in their tracks, as they have throughout history, even as we mourn deeply the tragedies that befall fellow human beings along the way.

Which brings us to the second part of what we can do. The internal. I so often find myself falling back on the serenity prayer, the paraphrase of that Reinhold Niebuhr prayer, that goes, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

As we’ve just outlined, there is a lot we can do which, if not immediately, then over time, can signal and manifest our resistance to fascism like this and turn back the tides. But we are also vessels ourselves, seeking to navigate a world with stormy seas whose waves we can’t control. The parashah (Torah portion) this week is Vayakhel. Vayakhel means, and they assembled. The Israelites in the aftermath of the betrayal of the golden calf, assembled, per God’s instruction through Moses, to build the mishkan, the portable sanctuary that would travel with them in the wilderness. The sanctuary that symbolized God’s presence amongst them. Note that scholars don’t think the intention was that God dwelled in the sanctuary. God was already present, they teach, but the Israelites, as human beings, needed a reminder, a visible, sacred reminder, that God was with us.

In times like this, it can be hard to remember that. But as this teaching suggests, God is with us. Emmanu el. God is with us. Calling out to us. Within us. Many teach that the mishkan refers not only to a visible external structure, but that it refers to us. We ourselves serve as the mishkan. The mishkan, the tabernacle, is a blueprint for our own souls, our own psyches, our own beings. Aleinu, it’s up to us, to make ourselves hospitable to that Godly presence, whatever that means for us. To cultivate space within ourselves for the divine to flourish, so that the actions we carry out within this world manifest that sense of shalom, that sense of wholeness, shalom comes from the word shalem, meaning wholeness, peace.

Even if we can’t control every iota of the world around us, we can keep tending to the ner tamid, the eternal flame, as part of the mishkan, the sanctuary, that we create within us, serving as that host for the divine, allowing ourselves to connect with that same flame, that same godliness in others. By tending to the sanctuary within us, facilitating space, for the divine to come to life, we facilitate the connection with the divine in others, helping us see through to the oneness underlying it all, so that our actions manifest that oneness, live up to it.

So look what we’ve done: we said this evening’s drash (teaching) was finally going to be political. That we were going to remain focused on world events. But we recognize that it’s all connected. To manifest goodness and peace and to fight injustice in this world, we also need to cultivate that sense of wholeness within ourselves. Sense of wholeness and of peace. Shalom.

Wishing and praying for peace in each of our lives.

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